In the state of the art, several machines are known which comprise means for taking said articles from a location where they are piled up in a scrambled arrangement and to individually deposit them in a lying position in a plurality of bottomless cavities secured on a structure travelling along a closed circuit above a supporting stationary plane. Said cavities have a such a configuration that within them the articles may only remain oriented with a given end either facing the cavity front part or back part, with respect to the direction of said travel. Thus the articles are driven inside the cavity, impelled by walls which delimit them, sliding supported on said supporting plane, to an unloading location where the supporting plane has an interruption defining an empty space through which the articles fall by gravity, being transferred from the cavities to chutes, each of which is located under a respective cavity, travelling together with it. Within each cavity there are means to support said given end of the article depending on the orientation of said article within the cavity so that when arriving to said interruption of the supporting plane, the article will always start to fall by the opposite non supported end, the article remaining within the chute with the given end facing upwards, from where it is delivered at an outlet.
European Patent EP-A-0 065 866 discloses a machine of this type with a receptacle adapted for loading said containers in bulk, with a rotatory disk which has peripheral openings defining article receiving cavities delimited by radial appendages so that each appendage limits by one side a cavity back part (in the travelling direction) and the by the other the front part of the following one. In this machine, said means to support a given end of the container (typically the bottleneck) depending on its orientation within the peripheral cavities consist in supports defined in two radial appendages which delimit it and comprising a specific configuration according to the container dimensions and the travelling direction, as because due to the inertial and frictional forces, the containers always tend to rest against the radial appendage of the back part. Therefore, the front part appendage comprises a simple support for said bottleneck while the appendage of the back part comprises a support for the bottleneck and in addition a stop configuration for the container bottom, so that when the recipient is oriented with the bottleneck facing toward the front part, said container bottleneck remains located on said support of the front part because its bottom is resting against said stop configuration and when the container is oriented with the bottleneck facing toward the back part, said container bottleneck remains resting against the back appendage and located on said support of the back part, because the stop configuration is designed to interfere only with the bottom and not with the bottleneck. Thus, when arriving at the area where the supporting plane is interrupted, the bottleneck always remain for a moment supported by said supports, regardless of the container orientation within the cavity, favouring that the fall always starts by the bottom so that the container remains within the chute with the bottleneck up.
This arrangement, although fully effective, shows the drawback that it requires very accurate shapes and dimensions for the cavities, supports and stop configurations depending on the shapes and dimensions of the type of containers to which they are designed. This means that the machine is only adapted for a single type of containers for which it was accurately designed unless it is proceeded to a slow and elaborate manual repositioning or replacement of each individual element.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,681,209 by the same applicant of this invention discloses a machine of this type in which there exists radial parts which show on one side, a front appendage and on the other side, a back appendage, the cavities remaining formed between two of said parts, said parts may be socketed on the machine moving structure, therefore they may very easily and quickly be replaced. Also, in said machine, the chutes are provided with snap-fit means therefore they are also easy to replace.
With this arrangement, a longitudinal matching to the heights of different types of containers in a relatively quick operation is achieved but it has the drawback that it has no transversal regulation available within the cavities for matching to containers having different widths.
The application of the French patent FR-A-91 12 375 by the same applicant of this invention, discloses an unscrambling machine of this type, having peripheral cavities delimited by radial appendages in which all the compartment front appendages are secured on a first circular structure while all the back appendages are secured on a second circular structure coaxially secured on the first the relative angular position of the second structure with respect to the first may be regulated, simultaneously adjusting this way the longitudinal distance between the front and the back appendages in all the compartments. For the chutes, said application of French Patent FR-A-91 12 375 adopts an analogous solution.
This solution shows a significant improvement with respect to said Patent EP-A-065866, however it still does not provide a solution to the problem of regulating as well the compartments as the chutes transversal spread.
On its side, in the application of Patent EP-0 578 602-BI by the same applicant of this invention, a machine of this type is disclosed in which the cavities are formed by a series of individual frame-like hollow bodies, and the chutes in an analogous way, the ones and the others may be socketed on the periphery of said rotatory structure so that as well the compartments as the chutes are very easily and quickly replaced, without tools being required, which allows to adapt the machine to different types of containers through the arrangement of a set of compartments and chutes for each type of container to be used.
The solution to the compartments and chutes replacement has the advantage to provide, in an easy and quick operation, matching in the very best way each type of container in the three dimensions of the space. However, this system requires the manufacture and storage of a great number of compartments and chutes which means a high economic cost.
Eventually, the application of patent PCT/ES 98/00143, by the same applicant of this invention proposes a machine of this type in which the cavities are formed by frame-like hollow bodies secured on a first rotatory structure, in a front part of each an elongated member is transversally arranged, which has an adjustable length acting as the container bottleneck support. All said elongated members are secured on a second circular structure coaxially secured on the first structure, the relative angular position of the second structure with respect to the first structure may be regulated, so that the longitudinal position of all the elongated members within their respective cavities is simultaneously regulated in a single operation. One of the side walls of each compartment is moveable; its position within it may be transversally regulated. Said transversal regulation of the length of every and all the elongated elements and/or the position of every and all the moving side walls can be carried out and can be jointly and simultaneously secured in a simple operation.
The chutes are formed by a front wall, a side wall and a back wall, leaving one open face that is delimited by the wall of a fixed housing. Every and all said chute back walls are connected to said first structure while every and all the front walls are connected to a third structure, moveable with respect to the first structure, the relative position between the first and the third structure may be connected in a position wished, obtaining thus a simultaneous matching of all the chutes to the width of a given type of container. Said chute side walls are transversally moveable and have an adjustable position.
Although this arrangement was found to be fully effective, it has the drawback that it requires multiple coaxial structures with angular positions adjustable to each other which means a relatively great complexity of the machine and a high weigh of the rotatory parts, which can carry problems associated to the centrifugal and inertial forces.